Important Books & Reports

Glyphosate/Roundup, falsely claimed by Monsanto to be safe and harmless, has become the world’s most widely and pervasively used herbicide; it has brought rising tides of birth defects, cancers, fatal kidney disease, sterility, and dozens of other illnesses - more

Ban GMOs Now - Dr. Mae-Wan Ho and Dr. Eva Sirinathsinghji

Health & environmental hazards
especially in the light of the new genetics - more

Living Rainbow H2O - Dr. Mae-Wan Ho

A unique synthesis of the latest findings in the quantum physics and chemistry of water that tells you why water is the “means, medium, and message of life” - more

The Rainbow and the Worm - the Physics of Organisms - Dr. Mae-Wan Ho

“Probably the Most Important Book for the Coming Scientific Revolution” - more

From the Editors

Dispelling Nuclear Myths

Propaganda stepped up post-Fukushima

After Fukushima, almost every country with nuclear
power stations paused to consider its position. France and Japan announced
plans to reduce their dependence on nuclear energy; Germany, Italy and
Switzerland renounced it altogether. China put its plans on hold until they
could be reassessed (Fukushima Fallout, SiS 51).

The response of the UK was
completely different. Only a day or two after the tsunami, when the situation
was spiralling out of control and no one could know what the consequences would
be, the government got together with the nuclear industry, not to consider what
lessons could be learned from the events at Fukushima but to put out propaganda
to allay any fears the public might have. In an email from the Department of
Business, Industry and Skills dated 13 March (the tsunami struck on 11 March)
we read We need to ensure the anti-nuclear chaps and chapesses do not gain
ground on this. We need to occupy the territory and hold it.

The campaign continues. If
you go to a meeting on energy, on sustainability or on climate change, you are
almost certain to find a speaker confidently proclaiming that nuclear energy is
both perfectly safe and the only way we can keep the lights on without
destroying the planet.

To put things in
perspective, according to the nuclear industry, nuclear power plants provided 13.5 percent of the
worlds electricity production in 2010, compared with close to 20 % of the
global electricity delivered by renewable energies in the same year. In
total energy terms, renewable energies accounted for 16 % of the global energy
consumed, whereas nuclear energy accounted for only 5.2 %. Obviously, nuclear
energy is not the way to keep the lights on,
and it could well destroy the planet with toxic and radioactive nuclear wastes;
while the potential for solar and wind alone have barely been tapped (see Green
Energies - 100% Renewable by 2050, ISIS/TWN publication).

As
for safety, apart from the pile up of nuclear wastes, there have been major
incidents at Three Mile Island, Chernobyl and Fukushima; and less well known
ones at Windscale in the UK, and many other places. But the lobbyists are doing
their best to convince us that none of these were serious enough. George
Monbiot, for example, insists that the number of deaths due to Chernobyl was at
most 58 [8], when even
official sources estimate thousands (see The Truth about
Chernobyl, SiS 47). And according
to the President of the Royal Society of Chemistry the public is only worried
about nuclear energy because of the grim way it is presented in film and
television dramas. Lets say yes to nuclear and no to Dr Nos nonsense,
he writes.

And
with regard to economics, nuclear plants are notorious for coming in very late
and massively over budget, which is why so few have been built in Europe and
the USA over the past twenty or so years (see The
Real Cost of Nuclear Power, SiS 47). The two currently under
construction, at Ulkiluoto and Flamanville, are doing no better. No country has
yet solved the problem of how to dispose of radioactive waste so no one knows
how much this will add to the cost. The estimated cost to the UK taxpayers of dealing with the waste that has already
been generated was £73 billion in 2008 and rising (see The Nuclear Black Hole
and other articles in the series, SiS 40).

The evidence on both safety
and cost is clear and we and others have been bringing it to everyones
attention for a long time (see for example Close-up on Nuclear
Safety, SiS 40). That hasnt stopped the
lobbyists, of course. They insist that it can be safe and cheap, Just look at
France.

French nuclear myths exposed

Whatever the UKs experience of nuclear power may have
been, we have only to look across the Channel to see an example of success, or so we are told. In response to the 1973 oil
crisis, France, which has very little in the way of fossil fuel
resources, committed itself to nuclear power. Today it has 58 reactors in operation and these produce
over three quarters of the countrys electricity and allow it to be the worlds
largest exporter of electricity as well. And whatever problems other countries
may have had, the French, well known for their skill in dealing with advanced
technology, have done this safely and cost effectively.

It
is certainly true that France has a lot of nuclear reactors; that it relies heavily
on nuclear power and exports electricity to its neighbours; and that so far it
has not had a major disaster.

It
is also true, however, that the French nuclear industry is a continuing
financial and ecological disaster, despite the fact it has received massive
hidden subsidies from the taxpayer. It is wildly over-capacity, with the result
that it must export electricity cheaply to other countries when demand is least
and buy it back at expensive prices (at net loss) when demand is high, and shut
down production over the weekend for good measure. The French government has
done its best to encourage the French to squander electricity for water and
space heating; a thermodynamic nightmare as far as efficiency is concerned. The
truth is that some 73 % of final energy in France is actually provided by fossil fuels; and still three
million households are cold in winter and considered to be in fuel poverty.

And
while they have not experienced anything on the scale of Three Mile Island,
Chernobyl or Fukushima, they have had their share of incidents serious enough
that they  and their neighbours  should be quite worried. The French
government had also done its best to conceal the radiation levels from the
Chernobyl accident from its own citizens.

To
expose these French nuclear myths, we have enlisted the help of Susie Greaves
who lives in France and has followed the nuclear industry closely for many
years. She will dispel any illusion you may have that the French experience
should encourage the UK or any other country to rely on nuclear energy in the future
(see French Nuclear
Power Not Safe, and The
True Costs of French Nuclear Power, SiS
53).

Shooting the messenger

Over the past year or so, the
lobbyists have been attacking the report of Yablokov and his colleagues on the
estimates of deaths associated with Chernobyl. This actually represents
progress, because until recently they simply ignored it.

There
is one particular argument we find especially worrying: the lobbyists criticise
Yablokov for conflating the figures for cancer with those relating to other
conditions. As the latter are not known to be associated with radiation, they
say, this gives a false picture. In fact, anyone who actually reads the report
will find that Yablokov deals with the two in separate sections. He provides a
clear estimate of about 250 000 deaths due to cancers.

Cancer
is by no means the only disorder that can be caused by radiation. Birth defects
are another, and many of the data cited in the report are concerned with
children. To give just one example, the Lothian region of Scotland received
more radiation than most of the rest of the UK, and there were significantly
more babies born there with Down syndrome in 1987, the year after Chernobyl.

Even
if a condition is generally accepted to have some other primary cause,
radiation can contribute to it, for example by accelerating its progress or
preventing the body from combating it effectively. This raises a very important
issue. Chernobyl was a disaster, but it was also in effect a potentially very
important experiment. Yablokov and his coworkers collected data from a very
large number of small regions, many in the former Soviet Union, some in other
countries. They were able to compare the incidence of many
conditions in areas that had experienced high levels of radiation with similar
areas that had not. For a whole range of diseases that have not been
considered to be linked to exposure to radiation, there is now epidemiological
evidence to suggest that they are.

That
does not constitute a proof of cause and effect, just as the work of Doll and
Bradford Hill did not prove that cigarette smoking causes lung cancer. But it
is a strong indication that there is a connection, and it should be the
starting point for more research. Instead, in their anxiety to discredit the Yablokov
report and so conceal the true scale of the Chernobyl
disaster international agencies including the WHO are deliberately ignoring a
unique set of data that could lead to a better understanding of many diseases and
of the dangers of ionising radiation. That is unconscionable.